The prices just keep going up on stuff, but that can't continue forever.

All the people nostalgic for the SNES will stop wanting games eventually and the next generation won't give a gently caress.

Yeah people say about the bubble bursting but really I see more that prices will dip/correct itself and level out. We won't go back to sub $500 little Samson or $50 earthbound like ten years ago. Every generation that grows up has lesser people that actually might be interested in physical retro stuff. There's gonna be a breaking point between these high prices and what people really want to spend on this hobby.

Prices are so high these days I would only have to sell like 5-10% of my collection to afford flash carts. I only want a nes/snes flash cart and a Sega saturn flash drive replacement. It gets more tempting every month and next year maybe I'll just buckle down, figure out what I would miss the least about my collection and get those flash carts.

Was there a conclusion to that debate about flash carts hurting the consoles through too much voltage or something?

Just wanted to respond to something fishmech posted in the last thread:

This mostly works, but be aware that there’s a decent number of games from the back half of the 360’s lifecycle (GTAV, Dragon Age Inquisition) that have mandatory HDD installs that require an official Hard Drive and won’t install on a USB drive.

Note that the Xbox one does play a large portion of Xbox 360 games (more than half if I remember right) and supports all installs to an external drive. Might be worth investing in a used Xbox one s. Gives you a 4k Blu Ray player, and access to rare replay and a large Xbox 360 library. They're also working on original Xbox og compatiblility.

Yeah people say about the bubble bursting but really I see more that prices will dip/correct itself and level out. We won't go back to sub $500 little Samson or $50 earthbound like ten years ago. Every generation that grows up has lesser people that actually might be interested in physical retro stuff. There's gonna be a breaking point between these high prices and what people really want to spend on this hobby.

Prices are so high these days I would only have to sell like 5-10% of my collection to afford flash carts. I only want a nes/snes flash cart and a Sega saturn flash drive replacement. It gets more tempting every month and next year maybe I'll just buckle down, figure out what I would miss the least about my collection and get those flash carts.

Was there a conclusion to that debate about flash carts hurting the consoles through too much voltage or something?

Note that the Xbox one does play a large portion of Xbox 360 games (more than half if I remember right) and supports all installs to an external drive. Might be worth investing in a used Xbox one s. Gives you a 4k Blu Ray player, and access to rare replay and a large Xbox 360 library. They're also working on original Xbox og compatiblility.

Except I have a perfectly functional X360, and zero interest in any XBOne exclusives.

From what I gathered Tengai Makyou Zero uses a special chip SPC7110 which is not yet supported by the SD2SNES which is a bummer. I wonder if ikari can code the support in for a future firmware release?

From what I gathered Tengai Makyou Zero uses a special chip SPC7110 which is not yet supported by the SD2SNES which is a bummer. I wonder if ikari can code the support in for a future firmware release?

Yeah what this is doing is burning the translation hack into new EEPROMs and then swapping those chips into a real TMZ board so you can use the SPC7100. Same principle behind Star Fox 2 repros. Last thing I read on the forum is that SD2SNES is capable but someone needs to implement it.

I don't think I've heard of anyone blowing up their consoles, but one good conclusion is Krikzz beginning to include proper voltage translation on new boards and revisions.

Yeah I don't think it was quite blowing up consoles, but rather, likely degrading them at a faster rate. If krikzz is getting proper voltage, it would be a good time to invest in flash carts. All I have to do is sell one copy of metal storm and I could afford the nes flash cart already.

Note that the Xbox one does play a large portion of Xbox 360 games (more than half if I remember right) and supports all installs to an external drive. Might be worth investing in a used Xbox one s. Gives you a 4k Blu Ray player, and access to rare replay and a large Xbox 360 library. They're also working on original Xbox og compatiblility.

It actually doens't play a lot of 360 games that aren't the super big hits, so it's extremely not worth it. Considering that original Xbox on 360 was the same way and really buggy at that, I wouldn't be hopeful there either. Out of my collection of about 60 360 games and another 50 Old Xbox games, only about 7 period are forward compatible and 3 of them are compromised due to emulation issues.

In Hartford? I was there. The girl in the blue dress and red hair in a ponytail?

There we go! This was our first con, how did you like our table? I already thought of ways to do it better next year but I thought we did pretty well. If you met/talked to Noah then that's me.

For anyone curious, we were demoing all our modded consoles on a PVM and doing live modding. Was nice to see peoples reactions to rgb modded consoles whether it's nes, n64 or the turbo I finished the first morning.

E: hmm, did you have a booth too?

Ee: or you were the girl who came with her friend/girlfriend and you chatted with us for a bit!

It actually doens't play a lot of 360 games that aren't the super big hits, so it's extremely not worth it. Considering that original Xbox on 360 was the same way and really buggy at that, I wouldn't be hopeful there either. Out of my collection of about 60 360 games and another 50 Old Xbox games, only about 7 period are forward compatible and 3 of them are compromised due to emulation issues.

Well yes of course more popular games are more common but I'm surprised at how few games you have that would work. Xbox og bc on Xbox 360 is more buggy than 360 on one so don't take it as an example of what the one is like playing 360 games. Did you consult their list lately? They literally update it with nearly 2-4 games every week. A week or two ago they got fable pub games working. They even have Japanese shmups like bullet soul running so they're not ignoring those as well.

And the real value is their promise that every title they have working will be forward compatible with every future Xbox. And a lot of them run much smoother on Xbox one. Reports indicate they'll look better on the Xbox one x, which will be on sale in a few years for less than $200.

Nothing wrong with keeping a 360 right now and playing everything on it but it's worth keeping an eye on Xbox one and its BC to see how it looks in the end. At the very least it actually will keep Xbox 360 disc prices lower as practically every game that's backwards compatible is actually available for sale digitally.

Well yes of course more popular games are more common but I'm surprised at how few games you have that would work. Xbox og bc on Xbox 360 is more buggy than 360 on one so don't take it as an example of what the one is like playing 360 games. Did you consult their list lately? They literally update it with nearly 2-4 games every week. A week or two ago they got fable pub games working. They even have Japanese shmups like bullet soul running so they're not ignoring those as well.

And the real value is their promise that every title they have working will be forward compatible with every future Xbox. And a lot of them run much smoother on Xbox one. Reports indicate they'll look better on the Xbox one x, which will be on sale in a few years for less than $200.

Nothing wrong with keeping a 360 right now and playing everything on it but it's worth keeping an eye on Xbox one and its BC to see how it looks in the end. At the very least it actually will keep Xbox 360 disc prices lower as practically every game that's backwards compatible is actually available for sale digitally.

You can get an X360 for even cheaper than that and actually have compatibility with the full library.

The Xbox One as a potential future backwards compatibility powerhouse also doesn't work great since the way it works is that it has to redownload the entire game from Microsoft and only uses the disc to verify that you own the game.

There we go! This was our first con, how did you like our table? I already thought of ways to do it better next year but I thought we did pretty well. If you met/talked to Noah then that's me.

For anyone curious, we were demoing all our modded consoles on a PVM and doing live modding. Was nice to see peoples reactions to rgb modded consoles whether it's nes, n64 or the turbo I finished the first morning.

E: hmm, did you have a booth too?

Ee: or you were the girl who came with her friend/girlfriend and you chatted with us for a bit!

It definetly looked cool. Though I am more interested in learning how to mod consoles myself then just buy them outright. You said your site has the tutorials for it all? It seems like half the fun of retro gaming involves the risk of either electrocuting yourself or burning yourself on a saudering iron.

It definetly looked cool. Though I am more interested in learning how to mod consoles myself then just buy them outright. You said your site has the tutorials for it all? It seems like half the fun of retro gaming involves the risk of either electrocuting yourself or burning yourself on a saudering iron.

No, I was alone and didnít have a table.

Gotcha, yeah we are working on finishing all the mod/repair tutorials before the end of the year. They are up on our YouTube. I remember who ya are now, thanks for stopping to check us out!

I tell ya I was so wiped after the con, met many cool people and it was a fun time.

Microsoft is prioritising digital-only games when it comes to XB1 BC, so the current BC library has a lot of weird forgotten XBLA games while missing a lot of obvious retail titles.

What I find most fascinating about their backwards-compatibility shenanigans is they have made several titles now where the 360 version runs on the XB1, but a proper XB1 version of the same title also exists. Apparently from a weird legal standpoint it was simpler/cheaper to throw engineers at making the 360 versions work on the XB1 rather than just giving 360 version owners the XB1 version as a free upgrade. They also made a Japan-only VN backwards compatible.

While there are definitely still some major titles missing from Backwards-compatibility, they've legitimately been doing a good job of whittling that list down, despite some odd choices here and there.

But yeah, this is probably a worthwhile discussion unto itself, but the newer consoles, while TECHNICALLY runnable offline, are missing tremendous content this way to a point where the XB1, PS4 and Switch are pretty much expected to be online machines (at least in a period touch-base fashion). There are games you can play offline unpatched fine but it's somewhat hard to predict in advance which games those will be, games this gen have been really bad about the discs being incomplete and a download being required to get the proper "finished" game (not even in terms of bugs but in terms of actual content). Even if you can't have it online all the time, even being able to plug in somewhere to get patches and the like improve things substantially for many titles.

The Xbox One as a potential future backwards compatibility powerhouse also doesn't work great since the way it works is that it has to redownload the entire game from Microsoft and only uses the disc to verify that you own the game.

Excuse me, what's supposed to be not great about that? It works even with scratched to gently caress old discs that you could never play on the original system, so long as it can read just enough to verify it's a real disc and what game its for. And you avoid all the disc load time stuff.

What the gently caress? I mean, it's a good message but...why here of all places?

AIDS response in the years prior to this machine was unbelievably hosed-up. The gay community had greater transmission rates just due to the biological realities of anal sex and due to being a largely ghetto-ized and marginalized population. Unfortunately this meant it was initially, and for a long time, seen as a gay-only disease, even initially being called GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency). While straight people were getting the disease too, gays were persecuted enough that anyone who had it was immediately considered to be an in-the-closet gay person. Reagan listened to religious leaders who treated AIDS as God punishing them for their sinful ways and completely ignored an appropriate response to it, and even suppressed studies, causing the disease to spread worldwide in a ridiculous way. There is a LOT of blood on Reagan's hands for this alone.

The late 80's/early 90's finally started turning this around when AIDS spread to a point where it was impossible to consider it gay-only anymore, and a BIG part of that was this need to pushback against a LOT of bad information that had been circulating around (if you re-watch Eddie Murphy's 1983 stand-up Delirious, after the horribly-aged gay jokes he makes some even more horribly-aged AIDS jokes based on what misinformation was known at the time). Remember that it's really loving hard to counter bad information that was initially presumed correct and requires an extra-heavy push to make headway (the anti-smoking gross pictures have actually had a pretty pronounced effect in countries where people are illiterate and legitimately had no clue that smoking had health consequences, partly because literally everyone smokes where they are so there's no "non-smokers" control group). And back then condoms were seen as an inconvenience and unmanly, that required a LOT of effort to counter and part of that was putting messages everywhere to basically say "hey, unprotected sex can give you AIDS which will loving kill you, even if you're having straight sex" anywhere and everywhere that message could be crammed in (and it took a long loving time for condom use to really fight that image of unmanliness, and that image still persists in older people and parts of Africa and elsewhere). This was also important because AIDS was an especially devastating STD, with others at the time being either easily treated (e.g. syphilis) or more of an inconvenience than a genuine health threat (e.g. herpes). There was even a Law & Order episode in its first season where AIDS=death was the crux of the story-line and in future airings they had to put a white-text-on-black-background splash screen before the episode saying "AIDS isn't the death sentence it was when we made this episode anymore".

Yeah people say about the bubble bursting but really I see more that prices will dip/correct itself and level out. We won't go back to sub $500 little Samson or $50 earthbound like ten years ago. Every generation that grows up has lesser people that actually might be interested in physical retro stuff. There's gonna be a breaking point between these high prices and what people really want to spend on this hobby.

I certainly agree on the rare games keeping value, I meant more than console prices will go back down well below $100 and generic games will return to a more normal price.

CIB Nintendo games will stay valuable, mainly because most people didn't keep the boxes, but I dunno there has to be a point where widely available flash carts for every single console and the aging out of late gen-x and early millenials will drop prices substantially. We're already seeing a number of the big collectors cashing out, but the smart people always get out early so it could be another fiver or ten years depending on how persistent nostalgia is.

Excuse me, what's supposed to be not great about that? It works even with scratched to gently caress old discs that you could never play on the original system, so long as it can read just enough to verify it's a real disc and what game its for. And you avoid all the disc load time stuff.

With Nintendo shutting down the Wii shop, or whatever, it's a legitimate concern.

I don't see Microsoft shutting down the marketplace anytime soon, but it would be nice if you could just install 360 and Xbox games from the disc.

It's worth noting that the 360 being Backwards-compatible on XB1 means they have to keep the 360 infrastructure going, so I don't think there's any looming concern about the service being entirely phased out in the near future like with the Wii. Also unlike on Wii, people are paying a subscription fee to use its online gaming features, which is further reason to keep it going.

I thought the NT Mini still required cartridges, did it have a way to run off SD cards or something? I mostly wanted the SD2SNES to deal with not having a huge drawer full of cartridges and failing batteries, I'd just keep the carts with stuff that wasn't compatible nearby and store the rest. Maybe start selling them off one of these days.

I wonder if it could dump battery saves to the SD, that + transparent plastic option would put me over the top. Is it silly to wish it had 4k output? Actually I guess 720p would work fine, it still divides evenly.

I wonder if it could dump battery saves to the SD, that + transparent plastic option would put me over the top. Is it silly to wish it had 4k output? Actually I guess 720p would work fine, it still divides evenly.

The NT Mini jailbreak included a rom/save dumper.

I love my NT Mini and this honestly seems like a better designed product in every way.

Analogue isn't saying that they told Kevtris not to jailbreak this one and it should be reasonably easy for him to port his 8-bit cores to this.

With Nintendo shutting down the Wii shop, or whatever, it's a legitimate concern.

I don't see Microsoft shutting down the marketplace anytime soon, but it would be nice if you could just install 360 and Xbox games from the disc.

No, because Nintendo barely knows how to use the internet. At this point a large part of the marketing for the entire Xbox line is backwards compatibility going forward, including things like keeping the 360's own online infrastructure up so popular games can do online play with 360s and Xbox Ones.

What's the availability of HDMI boards for NES/n64? People keep asking me for them but they never seem to be in stock, or you have to order them until the quota is filled then it could take weeks or months?

What's the availability of HDMI boards for NES/n64? People keep asking me for them but they never seem to be in stock, or you have to order them until the quota is filled then it could take weeks or months?

Yeah, they make them in batches, basically.

The UltraHDMI for N64 is on preorders right now, no idea when the NES one will be up. Looks like there was a batch this summer.

You may also find an installer who has them in stock for mods or sale, but it's iffier. I managed to get an UltraHDMI board by searching the N64 Reddit at just the right time.